I mentioned on another thread that most people can get by fine without
ever being taught evolutionary biology just as most folks can get by
fine without being taught cosmology, and asked why should we teach
evolution but not creationism or the evidence against evolution? Here,
fat from a decadent Thanksgiving feast and rested from the subsequent
obligatory nap, I answer my own question at length thanks to the
leisure afforded me by a four day weekend. BTW and in the spirit of
the season, I send out my thanks to all the contributors on Talk
Origins from whom I've learned so much.

Most folks can also get by fine in life without 'believing in' the
Holocaust. You can learn a trade, get married, have kids, raise them,
retire, and enjoy leisure, all without acknowledging it at all. Would
it materially change the life of most people if they were taught in
K-12 schools that the Holocaust might be a hoax?

There's a group of folks who advocate exactly this in spite of the
evidence. They're called Holocaust Deniers or Holohoaxers. They point
out that witnesses could be lying or exaggerating, they point out that
most of the living survivors still around were pretty young at the
time and they could be suffering from imperfect memories of a simple
internment camp or false memory syndrome and so forth. They suggest
documents have been faked or taken out of context. They point out
other possible uses for the installations/ruins of the 'alleged'
concentration camps. They quote mine credible historians so as to make
them appear to doubt the Holocaust, when in fact those academics fully
accept it. They say that even if a few Jews were killed, so were a
bunch of Germans and Poles and Gypsies and so on. They subtly play on
prejudice by suggesting it's in the interests of the "Zionists to play
it up for all the world's sympathy they can get" and go on to claim
that Jews "control broadcasting, publishing, and academia" so it would
be easy for them to do so. They correctly point out that the victors
write the history books.

So are you cool with your kids being taught that the Holocaust could
be a hoax just as easily as legitimate, that historians are unsure if
it even really happened, and that the Nazis might have been
overly demonized by a global conspiracy to promote Jewish-Israeli
interests? How about if the issue is being forced on your local school
board by a group of well funded individuals from outside your state
networking with the local mosque who've all made a previous commitment
to a fundamentalist Islamic sect ... but who swear they're not
motivated by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? You wouldn't question
their motives I'm sure and anyway, motives aren't the issue, this is
about "the truth" right?

It wouldn't really hurt kids to hear this alternative would it? And
just because spooky neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups have advanced
these arguments in the past that doesn't automatically make them
wrong, eh? Besides, there are degreed historians who have written
extensively about the Holohoax who have no clear affiliation with such
hate groups. Why not present both sides and let the kids decide which
to believe? Or at least let a few textbooks donated by Saudi Arabia
which point out possible weaknesses in the Holocaust theory be used
along with the conventional material, OK?

Or maybe just a sticker to keep the Muslim Holocaust deniers happy
explaining that the Holocaust cannot be confirmed with certainty and
is "only a possibility" should be placed on World History books?
Is the "Holocaust only" lobby so nervous that their case will fall
apart if examined closely that they can't even handle it being
challenged? Do you mind hiring teachers who advocate this alternative
and/or devoting expensive classroom educational resources to doing so?
And as long as we're at it, how about pointing out to those students
that some folks question the involvement of Islamic terrorists in
9-11, and suggest instead that was all part of the conspiracy as well?

How about it?

No analogy is perfect of course and one of the flaws in this one is
the comparison between the evidence for common descent and the
evidence for the Holocaust doesn't do common descent justice. There's
overwhelmingly convincing evidence that Jews were specifically
victimized and targeted as a group for massive industrial genocide by
a ruthlessly efficient and deadly Nazi machine. But faking the
Holocaust would be a hell of a lot easier than faking common descent
in terms of manufacturing evidence. All of the evidence for the
Holocaust is manmade thus placing itself at least technically within
human capacity to fabricate, whereas evolutionary biology relies on
massive widespread bodies of interlocking evidence ranging across many
subdisciplines in science that can be found in the natural world by
anyone who cares to take the time to look, and it can be found in
quantities and in contexts which would be impossible to manufacture.
And common descent is the unifying concept in biology, there is no
corresponding level of central importance in history for Holocaust
denial (although an appreciation of Israel and its origins is a
useful prerequisite for understanding a big part of the current unrest in
the Middle East). So 'faking' the Holocaust would be a piece of cake
in comparison to fabricating the evidence for common descent.

Because folks disagree, because some parents are prejudiced or
misinformed, because some are irrational, because at times some are
just plain whacked, and because issues involving children and politics
evoke some of our deepest emotions, we're always going to have debate
over how to teach kids and what to teach them. We're going to have
multiple explanations and claims for all kinds of phenomena coming
from every ideological and pseudoscientific corner. We're going to
have folks who want to teach kids all kinds of things.

How do we weed out the important from the unimportant, the credible
from the nonsense? The advanced from the basic?
Some explanations, such as geocentrism, are really terrible. Some
don't stand up to analytical scrutiny, such as astrology. Some claims
turn out to be hoaxes or mistakes like cold fusion. Some explanations
which are controversial but legitimate, such as string theory, are
very complex and cannot even be understood until the basics are
taught. How to decide what to teach and when to teach it?

Well, we've developed an admittedly imperfect but nonetheless workable
screening process to keep every idea under the sun from being taught
in basic k-12 core courses as fact or even reasonable alternatives.
The lesson plans have to be structured logically; you can't teach
algebra before you teach arithmetic. The material has to be widely
accepted by the relevant professionals; it's best to teach material
which has withstood the test of time. In science or history the
lessons have to be backed by evidence or make sense, and the material
needs to underscore the basics because we are talking about K-12
curricula.

ID comes up short on all these criteria. IDC makes no valid testable
predictions, it is not widely accepted, and far from withstanding the
test of time IDC has failed miserably and was rejected long ago.
Furthermore what little has been presented as candidate lesson plans
underscoring IDC as advocated by the Discovery Institute rests entirely
on criticisms of evolutionary biology (many of which are hardly
credible and are in fact well known Young Earth Creationist crap),
Irreducible Complexity, or mathematics involving algorithms and
topology, none of which can be taught effectively to students in K-12
schools without substantial prerequisite course work in basic skills.

Precisely because IDC fails all these criteria, the IDCists try end
run those safeguards and steamroll over those protocols by appealing
directly to grass roots organizations. The IDCists lobby - just as the
holohoaxers lobby - mostly to religious groups, cultural prejudice and
bigotry, and ignorance by presenting highly dubious [mis]information
to the public as equally valid alongside the mainstream conventional
explanations. Their goal is openly stated: to bring intense political
pressure on local school boards, elected officials, and textbook
publishers to teach these fringe ideas as equally valid regardless of if
they've met the above criteria that all other curricula must meet.

To allow that to happen is to do our children and ultimately our
culture an educational disservice. It's dishonest, it's unethical, it
opens up an expensive can of worms because every self proclaimed
victim of conspiracy and persecution with a whacky idea clamors for
teaching time, it's inaccurate, it's counterproductive to our
interests as a species, and I hope most importantly for theists and
atheists alike, from a moral perspective alone it reeks.